1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a communication system, and in particular, to a method and apparatus for configuring a downlink frame in a communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The next generation communication systems are developing to provide services having various Quality-of-Service (QoS) classes to Mobile Stations (MSs). A communication system based on Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16, referred to herein as an IEEE 802.16 communication system, is a typical example of a next generation communication system. For convenience, the following description will be made with reference to an IEEE 802.16 communication system.
Data transmission of an IEEE 802.16 communication system is achieved on a frame-by-frame basis, and each frame is divided into a Downlink (DL) frame, which is a region over which DL data can be transmitted, and an Uplink (UL) frame, which is a region over which UL data can be transmitted. The UL and DL frame regions each are divided in units of slots, which are 2-dimensional resources defined by the frequency domain (or frequency axis) and the time domain (or time axis).
A Base Station (BS) transmits DL data burst allocation information for an MS over a DL-MAP region of a DL frame. The DL frame includes a DL data burst allocation region, and the DL data burst allocation region occupies a plurality of time slots for DL data bursts to be transmitted. For example, in an IEEE 802.16 communication system, the BS, when allocating DL resources, records allocation information of the corresponding DL resources in a DL-MAP region having a fixed size.
Therefore, the conventional BS uses a fixed number of DL-MAP Information Elements (IEs) regardless of the size of the data burst allocation region and the number of data bursts to be allocated, causing a decrease in the resource utilization and efficiency.